The formation of IC (integrated circuits) patterns onto a target wafer in the semiconductor industry has been achieved mainly by optical reduction exposure using a light beam and optical lens system. Conventional photo-lithography has reached its physical limit because of unavoidable wave length related diffraction phenomena. Soft X-ray lithography is expected to overcome this limitation because X-rays have much shorter wave lengths.
A suitable imaging system for X-ray lithography having reductive or scale-down potential is not presently available. The process currently used in this art is the so called proximity exposure, process which will reproduce only an equi-dimensional copy of an original, for instance, a mask pattern. It is not possible to obtain a reduced copy, and the minimum line width to be transcripted from an original, or from a mask pattern, can not be finer than the width of the original.